OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Allocation in Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

How do we allocate scarcere sources? How do we fairly allocate costs? These are two pressing challenges facing society today. I discuss two recent projects at NICTA concerning resource and cost allocation. In the first, we have been working with FoodBank Local, a social startup working in collaboration with food bank charities around the world to optimise the logistics of collecting and distributing donated food. Before we can distribute this food, we must decide how to allocate it to different charities and food kitchens. This gives rise to a fair division problem with several new dimensions, rarely considered in the literature. In the second, we have been looking at cost allocation within the distribution network of a large multinational company. This also has several new dimensions rarely considered in the literature.
Modifications on Character Sequences and Construction of Large Even Length Binary Sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

It has been noticed that all the known binary sequences having the asymptotic merit factor $\ge 6$ are the modifications to the real primitive characters. In this paper, we give a new modification of the character sequences at length $N=p_1p_2\dots p_r$, where $p_i$'s are distinct odd primes and $r$ is finite. Based on these new modifications, for $N=p_1p_2\dots p_r$ with $p_i$'s distinct odd primes, we can construct a binary sequence of length $2N$ with asymptotic merit factor $6.0$
Decision-Making with Complex Data Structures using Probabilistic Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

Existing decision-theoretic reasoning frameworks such as decision networks use simple data structures and processes. However, decisions are often made based on complex data structures, such as social networks and protein sequences, and rich processes involving those structures. We present a framework for representing decision problems with complex data structures using probabilistic programming, allowing probabilistic models to be created with programming language constructs such as data structures and control flow. We provide a way to use arbitrary data types with minimal effort from the user, and an approximate decision-making algorithm that is effective even when the information space is very large or infinite. Experimental results show our algorithm working on problems with very large information spaces.
Image Inpainting Using Directional Tensor Product Complex Tight Framelets
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper we are particularly interested in the image inpainting problem using directional complex tight wavelet frames. Under the assumption that frame coefficients of images are sparse, several iterative thresholding algorithms for the image inpainting problem have been proposed in the literature. The outputs of such iterative algorithms are closely linked to solutions of several convex minimization models using the balanced approach which simultaneously combines the $l_1$-regularization for sparsity of frame coefficients and the $l_2$-regularization for smoothness of the solution. Due to the redundancy of a tight frame, elements of a tight frame could be highly correlated and therefore, their corresponding frame coefficients of an image are expected to close to each other. This is called the grouping effect in statistics. In this paper, we establish the grouping effect property for frame-based convex minimization models using the balanced approach. This result on grouping effect partially explains the effectiveness of models using the balanced approach for several image restoration problems. Inspired by recent development on directional tensor product complex tight framelets (TP-CTFs) and their impressive performance for the image denoising problem, in this paper we propose an iterative thresholding algorithm using a single tight frame derived from TP-CTFs for the image inpainting problem. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm can handle well both cartoons and textures simultaneously and performs comparably and often better than several well-known frame-based iterative thresholding algorithms for the image inpainting problem without noise. For the image inpainting problem with additive zero-mean i.i.d. Gaussian noise, our proposed algorithm using TP-CTFs performs superior than other known state-of-the-art frame-based image inpainting algorithms.
Consensus of switched multi-agent systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper, we consider the consensus problem of switched multi-agent system composed of continuous-time and discrete-time subsystems. By combining the classical consensus protocols of continuous-time and discrete-time multi-agent systems, we propose a linear consensus protocol for switched multi-agent system. Based on the graph theory and Lyapunov theory, we prove that the consensus of switched multi-agent system is solvable under arbitrary switching with undirected connected graph, directed graph and switching topologies, respectively. Simulation examples are also provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.
Detecting Weakly Simple Polygons
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2014
Year: 2014

A closed curve in the plane is weakly simple if it is the limit (in the Fréchet metric) of a sequence of simple closed curves. We describe an algorithm to determine whether a closed walk of length n in a simple plane graph is weakly simple in O(n log n) time, improving an earlier O(n^3)-time algorithm of Cortese et al. [Discrete Math. 2009]. As an immediate corollary, we obtain the first efficient algorithm to determine whether an arbitrary n-vertex polygon is weakly simple; our algorithm runs in O(n^2 log n) time. We also describe algorithms that detect weak simplicity in O(n log n) time for two interesting classes of polygons. Finally, we discuss subtle errors in several previously published definitions of weak simplicity.
Extreme State Aggregation Beyond MDPs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement learning is concerned with mapping histories/raw-states to reduced/aggregated states. The idea behind both is that the resulting reduced process (approximately) forms a small stationary finite-state MDP, which can then be efficiently solved or learnt. We considerably generalize existing aggregation results by showing that even if the reduced process is not an MDP, the (q-)value functions and (optimal) policies of an associated MDP with same state-space size solve the original problem, as long as the solution can approximately be represented as a function of the reduced states. This implies an upper bound on the required state space size that holds uniformly for all RL problems. It may also explain why RL algorithms designed for MDPs sometimes perform well beyond MDPs.
Car-following model on two lanes and stability analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2014
Year: 2014

Considering lateral influence from adjacent lane, an improved car-following model is developed in this paper. Then linear and non-linear stability analyses are carried out. The modified Korteweg-de Vries (MKdV) equation is derived with the kink-antikink soliton solution. Numerical simulations are implemented and the result shows good consistency with theoretical study.
Strengthened Lazy Heaps: Surpassing the Lower Bounds for Binary Heaps
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2014
Year: 2014

Let $n$ denote the number of elements currently in a data structure. An in-place heap is stored in the first $n$ locations of an array, uses $O(1)$ extra space, and supports the operations: minimum, insert, and extract-min. We introduce an in-place heap, for which minimum and insert take $O(1)$ worst-case time, and extract-min takes $O(\lg{} n)$ worst-case time and involves at most $\lg{} n + O(1)$ element comparisons. The achieved bounds are optimal to within additive constant terms for the number of element comparisons. In particular, these bounds for both insert and extract-min -and the time bound for insert- surpass the corresponding lower bounds known for binary heaps, though our data structure is similar. In a binary heap, when viewed as a nearly complete binary tree, every node other than the root obeys the heap property, i.e. the element at a node is not smaller than that at its parent. To surpass the lower bound for extract-min, we reinforce a stronger property at the bottom levels of the heap that the element at any right child is not smaller than that at its left sibling. To surpass the lower bound for insert, we buffer insertions and allow $O(\lg^2{} n)$ nodes to violate heap order in relation to their parents.
Feature Extraction from Degree Distribution for Comparison and Analysis of Complex Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2014
Year: 2014

The degree distribution is an important characteristic of complex networks. In many data analysis applications, the networks should be represented as fixed-length feature vectors and therefore the feature extraction from the degree distribution is a necessary step. Moreover, many applications need a similarity function for comparison of complex networks based on their degree distributions. Such a similarity measure has many applications including classification and clustering of network instances, evaluation of network sampling methods, anomaly detection, and study of epidemic dynamics. The existing methods are unable to effectively capture the similarity of degree distributions, particularly when the corresponding networks have different sizes. Based on our observations about the structure of the degree distributions in networks over time, we propose a feature extraction and a similarity function for the degree distributions in complex networks. We propose to calculate the feature values based on the mean and standard deviation of the node degrees in order to decrease the effect of the network size on the extracted features. The proposed method is evaluated using different artificial and real network datasets, and it outperforms the state of the art methods with respect to the accuracy of the distance function and the effectiveness of the extracted features.
Stochastic bridges of linear systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2014
Year: 2014

We study a generalization of the Brownian bridge as a stochastic process that models the position and velocity of inertial particles between the two end-points of a time interval. The particles experience random acceleration and are assumed to have known states at the boundary. Thus, the movement of the particles can be modeled as an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process conditioned on position and velocity measurements at the two end-points. It is shown that optimal stochastic control provides a stochastic differential equation (SDE) that generates such a bridge as a degenerate diffusion process. Generalizations to higher order linear diffusions are considered.
Optimizing Auto-correlation for Fast Target Search in Large Search Space
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

In remote sensing image-blurring is induced by many sources such as atmospheric scatter, optical aberration, spatial and temporal sensor integration. The natural blurring can be exploited to speed up target search by fast template matching. In this paper, we synthetically induce additional non-uniform blurring to further increase the speed of the matching process. To avoid loss of accuracy, the amount of synthetic blurring is varied spatially over the image according to the underlying content. We extend transitive algorithm for fast template matching by incorporating controlled image blur. To this end we propose an Efficient Group Size (EGS) algorithm which minimizes the number of similarity computations for a particular search image. A larger efficient group size guarantees less computations and more speedup. EGS algorithm is used as a component in our proposed Optimizing auto-correlation (OptA) algorithm. In OptA a search image is iteratively non-uniformly blurred while ensuring no accuracy degradation at any image location. In each iteration efficient group size and overall computations are estimated by using the proposed EGS algorithm. The OptA algorithm stops when the number of computations cannot be further decreased without accuracy degradation. The proposed algorithm is compared with six existing state of the art exhaustive accuracy techniques using correlation coefficient as the similarity measure. Experiments on satellite and aerial image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
On Uplink-Downlink Duality for Cellular IA
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

In our previous work we considered the uplink of a hexagonal cellular network topology and showed that linear "one-shot" interference alignment (IA) schemes are able to achieve the optimal degrees of freedom (DoFs) per user, under a decoded-message passing framework that allows base-stations to exchange their own decoded messages over local backhaul links. In this work, we provide the dual framework for the downlink of cellular networks with the same backhaul architecture, and show that for every "one-shot" IA scheme that can achieve $d$ DoFs per user in the uplink, there exists a dual "one-shot" IA scheme that can achieve the same DoFs in the downlink. To enable "Cellular IA" for the downlink, base-stations will now use the same local backhaul links to exchange quantized versions of the dirty-paper precoded signals instead of user messages.
Identifying Social Satisfaction from Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2014
Year: 2014

We demonstrate the critical need to identify social situation and instability factors by acquiring public social satisfaction in this research. However, subject to the large amount of manual work cost in subject recruitment and data processing, conventional self-reported method cannot be implemented in real time or applied in large scale investigation. To solve the problem, this paper proposed an approach to predict users' social satisfaction, especially for the economy-related satisfaction based on users' social media records. We recruited 2,018 Cantonese active participants from each city in Guangdong province according to the population distribution. Both behavioral and linguistic features of the participants are extracted from the online records of social media, i.e., Sina Weibo. Regression models are used to predict Sina Weibo users' social satisfaction. Furthermore, we consult the economic indexes of Guangdong in 2012, and calculate the correlations between these indexes and the predicted social satisfaction. Results indicate that social satisfaction can be significantly expressed by specific social media features; local economy satisfaction has significant positive correlations with several local economy indexes, which supports that it is reliable to predict social satisfaction from social media.
IPFS - Content Addressed, Versioned, P2P File System
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2014
Year: 2014

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. In some ways, IPFS is similar to the Web, but IPFS could be seen as a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository. In other words, IPFS provides a high throughput content-addressed block storage model, with content-addressed hyper links. This forms a generalized Merkle DAG, a data structure upon which one can build versioned file systems, blockchains, and even a Permanent Web. IPFS combines a distributed hashtable, an incentivized block exchange, and a self-certifying namespace. IPFS has no single point of failure, and nodes do not need to trust each other.
A New Fuzzy DEMATEL-TODIM Hybrid Method for evaluation criteria of Knowledge management in supply chain
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2014
Year: 2014

Knowledge management (KM) adoption in the supply chain network needs a good investment as well as few changes in the culture of the entire SC. Knowledge management is the process of creating, distributing and transferring information. The goal of this study is to Rank KM criteria in supply chain network in Iran which is important for firms these days. Criterion used in this paper were extracted from the literature review and were confirmed by supply chain experts. The proposed approach for ranking and finding out about these criterion is hybrid fuzzy DEMATEL-TODIM, with using fuzzy number as data for our studies we could avoid uncertainty. The data was gathered from PhD. And Ms. Students in industrial engineering of Kharrazmi university of Tehran and PhD. And Ms. Students of the management department of Semnan university. A new hybrid approach was used for achieving the results of this study. This new hybrid approach ranks data criteria respect to each other, then by using TODIM for ranking respect to the best situation (gains), the rates of criterion were determined which is a very important advantage
Concrete Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme with Verifiable Outsourced Decryption
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2014
Year: 2014

As more sensitive data is shared and stored by third-party sites on the internet, there will be a need to encrypt data stored at these sites. One drawback of encrypting data is that it can be selectively shared only at a coarse-grained level. Attribute based encryption is a public-key-based one-to-many encryption that allows users to encrypt and decry pt data based on user attributes. A promising application of ABE is flexible access control of encrypted data stored in the cloud using access policies and ascribed attributes associated with private keys and cipher text. One.One of the main efficiency drawbacks of the existing ABE schemes is that decryption involves expensive pairing operations and the number of such operations grows with the complexity of the access policy. Finally, we show an implementation scheme and result of performance measurements, which indicates a significant reduction on computing resources imposed on users.
An Enhancement Neighborhood connected Segmentation for 2D-Cellular Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

A good segmentation result depends on a set of "correct" choice for the seeds. When the input images are noisy, the seeds may fall on atypical pixels that are not representative of the region statistics. This can lead to erroneous segmentation results. In this paper, an automatic seeded region growing algorithm is proposed for cellular image segmentation. First, the regions of interest (ROIs) extracted from the preprocessed image. Second, the initial seeds are automatically selected based on ROIs extracted from the image. Third, the most reprehensive seeds are selected using a machine learning algorithm. Finally, the cellular image is segmented into regions where each region corresponds to a seed. The aim of the proposed is to automatically extract the Region of Interests (ROI) from in the cellular images in terms of overcoming the explosion, under segmentation and over segmentation problems. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the segmented image and the segmented results are less noisy as compared to some existing algorithms.
Helium: Visualization of Large Scale Plant Pedigrees
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2014
Year: 2014

Background: Plant breeders are utilising an increasingly diverse range of data types in order to identify lines that have desirable characteristics which are suitable to be taken forward in plant breeding programmes. There are a number of key morphological and physiological traits such as disease resistance and yield that are required to be maintained, and improved upon if a commercial variety is to be successful. Computational tools that provide the ability to pull this data together, and integrate with pedigree structure, will enable breeders to make better decisions on which plant lines are used in crossings to meet both critical demands for increased yield/production and adaptation to climate change. Results: We have used a large and unique set of experimental barley (H. vulgare) data to develop a prototype pedigree visualization system and performed a subjective user evaluation with domain experts to guide and direct the development of an interactive pedigree visualization tool which we have called Helium. Conclusions: We show that Helium allows users to easily integrate a number of data types along with large plant pedigrees to offer an integrated environment in which they can explore pedigree data. We have also verified that users were happy with the abstract representation of pedigrees that we have used in our visualization tool.
Recovery of Images with Missing Pixels using a Gradient Compressive Sensing Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

This paper investigates the possibility of reconstruction of images considering that they are sparse in the DCT transformation domain. Two approaches are considered. One when the image is pre-processed in the DCT domain, using 8x8 blocks. The image is made sparse by setting the smallest DCT coefficients to zero. In the other case the original image is considered without pre-processing, assuming the sparsity as intrinsic property of the analyzed image. A gradient based algorithm is used to recover a large number of missing pixels in the image. The case of a salt-and-paper noise affecting a large number of pixels is easily reduced to the case of missing pixels and considered within the same framework. The reconstruction of images affected with salt-and-paper impulsive is compared with the images filtered using a median filter. The same algorithm can be used considering transformation of the whole image. Reconstructions of black and white and colour images are considered.
Illustrating Polymerization using Three-level Model Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2014
Year: 2014

Research in cell biology is steadily contributing new knowledge about many different aspects of physiological processes like polymerization, both with respect to the involved molecular structures as well as their related function. Illustrations of the spatio-temporal development of such processes are not only used in biomedical education, but also can serve scientists as an additional platform for in-silico experiments. In this paper, we contribute a new, three-level modeling approach to illustrate physiological processes from the class of polymerization at different time scales. We integrate physical and empirical modeling, according to which approach suits the different involved levels of detail best, and we additionally enable a simple form of interactive steering while the process is illustrated. We demonstrate the suitability of our approach in the context of several polymerization processes and report from a first evaluation with domain experts.
Non-Monotonic Reasoning and Story Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

This paper develops a Reasoning about Actions and Change framework integrated with Default Reasoning, suitable as a Knowledge Representation and Reasoning framework for Story Comprehension. The proposed framework, which is guided strongly by existing knowhow from the Psychology of Reading and Comprehension, is based on the theory of argumentation from AI. It uses argumentation to capture appropriate solutions to the frame, ramification and qualification problems and generalizations of these problems required for text comprehension. In this first part of the study the work concentrates on the central problem of integration (or elaboration) of the explicit information from the narrative in the text with the implicit (in the readers mind) common sense world knowledge pertaining to the topic(s) of the story given in the text. We also report on our empirical efforts to gather background common sense world knowledge used by humans when reading a story and to evaluate, through a prototype system, the ability of our approach to capture both the majority and the variability of understanding of a story by the human readers in the experiments.